What was the challenge you were trying to address?
At Lloyds we are intrinsically linked to every aspect of the housing life cycle, we’re the biggest lender to first-time buyers, finance housing developers and local authorities who provide social homes etc. I wanted to use our influence to ensure we delivered purpose alongside profits. The challenge I believed we could help tackle was around the housing crisis and access to housing, specifically for low-income individuals.
With backing from our Housing Partnership (local government agencies & authorities, large housing builders and Homelessness charity ‘Crisis’) it was decided that we need to create over a million new homes at social rent to support the demand for social housing and tackle homelessness in the UK. We knew we couldn’t solve this on our own, it is a complex multi-system challenge and we relied on the expertise of multiple partner organisations from different sectors who worked together to enable us to start moving forward.
What did you do to address the challenge?
After the creation of the Housing Partnership, we got together as a group and worked out what has been done to date and where we could experiment. As a result, various initiatives and workstreams were created. One came about after looking at the Lloyds property strategy in a post COVID world with various old sites sitting empty across the UK. We then committed to using the disused landsite locations and turning them into social housing to help us reach our million-housing creation goal. The first experiment for this is our site in Pudsey, Leeds, an old office and data centre that will be turned into 80 affordable new homes built sustainably with heat pumps and solar panels to be as future proof as possible. We’re currently in the planning process and hope to have planning permission in early 2025, when we can start appointing builders and hopefully break ground maybe Summer next year.
We know it’s a drop in the ocean compared to our end goal of a million homes but one of the things that Forward Institute taught me is small steps add up to huge leaps, if we can give 80 families new homes then that's already a huge achievement and a step in the right direction. This feels like the beginning, it enables us to get parts of a system working together to make a blueprint for next time. During my time on the Forward Insitute Fellowship I've been able to make connections from the public sector across Government Depts, and we’ve been getting excited at the prospect of a future where old sites like disused air bases could one day be turned into housing too.
What impact do you believe this initiative has had and will continue to have?
Although the initiative is only just beginning there are areas where this has started to have an impact. Firstly, spreading awareness and the culture shift for a big corporate like Lloyds. I think it’s hugely beneficial to the wider issue of social housing to have an organisation like Lloyds put ourselves in the media and show our passion to be part of finding a solution that ultimately helps end homelessness. The press release we did with Crisis has generated a lot of interest from others who previously may not have shown interest or had time to be a part of this, as a result we have been able to access parts of the Government and networks of people that we hadn’t been able to before. By publicly speaking up we hope this may spark positive change across other organisations who hadn’t thought previously this was an area they should or could be involved in.
Once the process of building the 80 homes starts, it will have a big impact on the local economy in so many ways, from hiring tradespeople, builders, sustainability experts for heat pumps to regenerating the area with 80 new families who are doing their food shop in the high street and at local businesses for example. The biggest impact of course is on the lives of the 80 families who will have the stability of raising children in safe new buildings, research has been done that shows that this stability reduces the use of the NHS due to better mental and physical health, and can also result in greater educational achievements which makes falling into crime less likely.
I really wouldn’t have even thought about trying to tackle this problem had it not been for my time with the Forward Institute. The programme forced me to really sit and think about what is that I'm doing for the world and is it something good?
What are your learnings so far?
One of the biggest learnings from this initiative so far is not to shy away from your ambitious targets. When we first created the goal to create a million homes for social rent that number felt...huge. It made it feel almost impossible to know where to start. One of the exercises we did at one of the Forward Institute residentials was the process of breaking bigger problems into small steps and smaller pieces to make it more manageable and then experiment with it. We’re doing a lot of testing right now and we might not get something right, it might fail, in which case we move on and experiment with something else. Finding these smaller ways to experiment is so useful and much less intimidating than jumping straight in headfirst to your end target.
I know many leaders suffer to silence the imposter syndrome internally and negativity externally from those who think you can’t do something. Everyone’s got opinions and always will, but if you find something you genuinely believe you can make a difference in, a problem, that aligns with your values, and you have a responsibility for, it’ll make the noise so much easier to ignore. If you’re able to block out the negativity then you’ll only be accountable to yourself.